Juan Carlos Fresnadillo Exits ‘Highlander’ Remake

There can be only one and it won’t be Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. According to Deadline, the director, who has been attached to the film for about a year now, has departed as helmer for the planned reboot of ‘Highlander.’

While no specific reason was disclosed about Fresnadillo’s departure, it’s been said that he and Summit could not settle on the vision of the film and have finally agreed to disagree and part ways. His departure was said to be amicable.

Fresnadillo had passed on directing the remake of ‘The Crow’ in order to direct ‘Highlander’ and was very excited about coming on board for the film. In interviews, he has not been shy about his take on the movie and had said that he’s wanted to “combine realism with an epic story” and wanted to “track the hero in such a way that you truly feel his immortality.”

Summit is still very keen on making the remake which is said to have the same characters and would occur in the same universe as the original film but will be starting from scratch. The original draft of the screenplay was written by Melissa Rosenberg, the same person who scribed the ‘Twilight’ films, but the ‘Iron Man’ writing team of Art Marcum and Matt Holloway were brought in for rewrites and are being credited for the script. Still on board to play the lead role is Ryan Reynolds.

The original ‘Highlander’ movie followed the story of Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) a Scottish clansman who finds out he is immortal and is thrust into the “game” where immortals are destined to fight one another until “there can be only one” who survives to obtain the “Prize.” The film was popular and had an enough of a cult following that it spawned four sequels, an animated series, an animated film and a successful television series starring Adrian Paul.

While I’m happy to hear that Summit will still go forward with the ‘Highlander’ project, I am curious to see how Reynolds handles the title role. Admittedly, he is not the first person I would think of to play an immortal born in the highlands of Scotland but he does have some pretty good swordplay skills which were seen when he was cast as Deadpool in ‘X-Men: Wolverine’.

Come Monday morning, the studio will be looking for a director. As for Fresnadillo, he’s got a couple other projects that he may now get to… hopefully one will be that ‘Bioshock’ movie that has been in development purgatory for some time now.

Who would you like to see direct ‘Highlander’ or do you think Summit should leave the franchise alone?

Janice Kay

Janice's first memories of the genre were of watching the original 'Star Trek' and classic 'Doctor Who' episodes (Tom Baker, aka the Fourth Doctor, was her first). Soon, she was introduced to 'Godzilla' and her addiction then spread to books, magazines, movies and comics. Janice continued as a closet geek as her thirst and love for sci-fi grew and was only second to her love of baking. Then one night, on a whim, she answered a tweet to be a writer for ScienceFiction.com and the geek girl insider her was soon set free. Within 3 years she became the Senior Editor for the site. When not writing or editing for ScienceFiction.com, Janice is scouring the internet to feed her sci-fi cravings while defending conspiracy theories, protecting scientific theorems and loving all things science fiction.... and baking cookies.